In the LA Times, Julie Makinen explains why Peng and her image makers may have a difficult time.

Yet crafting a public role for Peng will require Communist Party image makers to delicately navigate millenniums-old suspicion of women near the centre of power in China, the party’s own squeamishness about making officials’ private lives public, and a gossipy media culture increasingly critical of elites’ lifestyles and behaviour.

“In China, there’s still this strain of thought, particularly in the countryside, that there are two possible roles for a female: the woman is either servile … or an empress type,” said Ross Terrill, who wrote biographies of Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing. “There’s still a feeling that women can lead men astray, especially in affairs of the state.”